--On Thursday, 12 October, 2006 18:27 -0400 Scott Bradner
<sob(_at_)harvard(_dot_)edu> wrote:
see RFC 3563 for one agreement
Scott, there are lots of agreements at the WG-WG level. There
are even a few agreements creating and identifying IETF Category
A liaisons to a few selected ISO/IEC JTC1 SCs (all of which are
readily available, as Dave pointed out).
Those arrangements are not MOUs, they are either Cooperative
Agreements, Joint Development Agreements, or Category (usually
A) Liaison Agreements, each of which has a very specific
definition in the JTC1 Directives which are, themselves
available via ISO's Web site at http://www.iso.ch/ with variant
details being documented either in RFCs (typically paralleling
ISO/IEC JTC1 numbered documents) or on our web site.
But we have never had a liaison relationship, or document
recognition agreement of any other type, at the "ISO" or ISO/IEC
JTC1 levels as far as I know and documents like 3563 certainly
don't change that. Indeed, requests for such a relationship,
when we made them, were repeatedly turned down.
More below.
--On Thursday, 12 October, 2006 15:20 -0700 "Fleischman, Eric"
<eric(_dot_)fleischman(_at_)boeing(_dot_)com> wrote:
John,
Please remember with me back to the mid-1990s when ISO sent
official liaison reps to the IETF. The way I recall (perhaps
incorrectly) things working back then was that from the ISO
perspective, these were official liaison reps formally
sanctioned according to ISO processes but from our perspective
they were technical people representing themselves just like
anybody else in the IETF.
Nope, never happened. Please forgive me for splitting hairs,
but, if one is going to ask questions or make legalistic
statements about these things (or demand to see legal
agreements) some very fine distinctions are actually important.
From an ISO perspective (under either the ISO rules or the
slightly different Directives for ISO/IEC JTC1) liaisons are
both formal and symmetric. There is no such beastie as an
official liaison rep to us where there is no mutual (and formal)
liaison relationship.
Now, before we both get really confused, two other things
happened then, and happen now:
(1) There are specific liaison relationships between the IETF
(or IETF Areas or WGs) and various ISO subgroups, almost all, if
not all, of them, subgroups of JTC1. With the exception of a
very small number of agreements about how specific technology
developments would be pursued, of which RFC 3563 is an example,
all of these agreements are the same: to a first-order
approximation they create two-way liaison arrangements, we (for
some value of "we") get to look at their working documents and
they get to look at ours (not that the latter amounts to much,
since we don't consider our working documents confidential), and
we both agree that, if one group says something to the other,
the other group will pay attention (although not necessarily
agree or act). There are no such agreements with ISO, or with
JTC1: they get requested and worked out one ISO TC or
Subcommittee, and one JTC1 Subcommittee (or occasionally WG) at
a time. 3563 is just such an agreement: it is between IETF and
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC6 on a specific topic and program of work
(although I think we still have a Category A liaison with SC6 as
well).
(2) Lots and lots of informal arrangements happen, with no
formal agreements between the entities involved. We've tended
to encourage those and they have tended to work well, in part
because they tend to operate at the technical/engineering layer
while formal liaisons at the ISO SC level and above tend to
involve strong doses of the political layer. The IAB sometimes
has cause to get concerned about people starting sentences with
"I represent the IETF and..." or with "The IETF believes...",
but, in general things work well, either without or after the
administration of some education (see RFC 4052 and 4053).
We still have liaison activities happening today. For example,
at the NSIS WG meeting in Montreal, individuals mentioned the
actions they were personally taking to keep NSIS in synch with
specific 3GPP activities. My point being that just because we
don't formally recognize liaisons doesn't mean that
individuals do not perform informal liaison services on their
own volition.
Of course, see (2) above. But the question was about a formal
agreement with ISO, and I am reasonably certain that no such
agreement exists. Certainly it did not exist in the mid-, or
even late-, 90s.
john
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